“Starting a novel is opening a door on a misty landscape; you can still see very little but you can smell the earth and feel the wind blowing.”

Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.

Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.

This sort of quiet gazing, which was like a feeding of the heart.

I felt a deep grief that crouched and stayed still as if it was afraid to move.

What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone’s company you love them.

Love doesn’t think like that. All right, it’s blind as a bat- Bats have radar. Yours doesnt seem to be working.

What an extraordinary satisfaction there is in cleaning things! (Does the satisfaction depend on ownership? I suspect so.

The talk of lovers who have just declared their love is one of life’s most sweet delights. Each vies with the other in humility, in amazement at being so valued. The past is searched for the first signs and each one is in haste to declare all that he is so that no part of his being escapes the hallowing touch.

One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats, and if some of these can be inexpensive and quickly procured so much the better.

We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality says Iris Murdoch. But given the state of the world, is it wise?

Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved.

One should go easy on smashing other people’s lies. Better to concentrate on one’s own.

There is a gulf fixed between those who can sleep and those who cannot. It is one of the greatest divisions of the human race.

People have disappointed me and deceived me and let me down.

Jealousy is perhaps the most involuntary of all strong emotions. It steals consciousness, it lies deeper than thought. It is always there, like a blackness in the eye, it discolours the world.

We need a moral philosophy which can speak significantly of Freud and Marx and out of which aesthetic and political views can be generated. We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now, can once again be made central.

Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.

Read absolutely everything you get your hands on because you’ll never know where you’ll get an idea from.

The reason I collect good ideas is because plots themselves are very difficult indeed to come by.

When I look at my room, I see a girl who loves books.

I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.

Read a lot. Reading really helps. Read anything you can get your hands on.

It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own.

Good books don’t give up all their secrets at once.